Vincent Brillant-Giroux, Ph.D.

Anthropologist


Associate member – Centre for Research on India, South Asia and its Diaspora (CERIAS), Université du Québec à Montréal


Postdoctoral fellowship, University of Toronto (2022)
Ph.D., Université de Montréal (2019)

I am an anthropologist whose work explores how ritual performance serves as a space for ethical reflection, memory, and social transformation. After completing a PhD in anthropology at the Université de Montréal, I pursued postdoctoral research in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. My research interests include ritual theory, popular Hinduism, the anthropology of ethics, possession, and social mobility in India. My main ethnographic projects have been conducted in Kerala, South India. There, I studied the transmission of historical memory in Theyyam festivals, where rituals enact a hierarchical inversion that gives life to a mythology recalling the past, thereby fostering reflection on ethical values and social relations among practitioners and the public today. Among Adivasi communities, I examined processes of ancestor deification, the transmission of an ethics of leadership and responsibility, and the negotiation of non-traditional roles for women in ritual contexts, in order to understand the revival of these practices in contemporary Kerala. I have also contributed to research projects on religious diversity in Quebec, hijra communities in India, and informal labour in the Indian context.